Residents from the locality of Nwamandzele,
in the drought-stricken district of Mabalane, in the southern province of Gaza,
are complaining that commercial farmers in the region are refusing to share
their water sources with the local people. They made this denunciation in a
meeting with Prime Minister Luisa Diogo, during her visit to that locality on
6 November.

Expressing her concern over the issue,
Prime Minister Diogo told AIM that the farmers in question have already been
identified and advised to change their attitude. "We have the names of
these business people and we have already talked to them to change their attitude
and to start responding to this kind of situation by sharing water resources
with the residents, particularly in this emergency situation", she said.

Drought in the entire district of
Mabalane is so serious that the district administrator, Emilia Machaieie, declared
that all the existing 177 small reservoirs are completely dry. The Limpopo river,
that runs across the district, barely exists: the once mighty river has been
reduced to a few pockets of water here and there.

Prime Minister Diogo stressed that
those who have some sources of water for the use of humans and livestock should
share them with everyone else in the community, even if those sources were built
at their own expense. "From the point of view of social life, in a situation
where even the international community has been called upon for its support,
it is essential that within Mozambique civil society and business people make
their contribution", declared the Prime Minster.

Prime Minister Diogo's visit to Gaza,
and particularly to Mabalane, aimed, among other issues, at verifying on the
ground the situation of drought in one of the most affected provinces in the
country, and the actions that the local government is taking to mitigate it.

She stressed the urgent need to open
boreholes in the most affected areas, to relieve the chronic shortage of water,
because otherwise the situation "may go from severe to dramatic within
the next 30 days".

Deaths reported

Meanwhile, the provincial government
is looking into claims that at least 43 people have died of hunger in the province,
provoked by prolonged drought. The provincial governor, Djalma Lourenco, on
7 November told Prime Minister Diogo that 34 of the deaths were reported in
Alto Changane, three in Malehice (both in Chibuto district), and six in Nalaze
(in Guija district). Lourenco said that the government had learnt of these deaths
in direct contact with the population of these areas.

The figure for those in need of food
aid in Gaza has now risen to 103,112. The province requires 5,000 tonnes of
grain, 480 tonnes of pulses and 230 tonnes of vegetable oil to feed these people
over the next three months. The estimated cost of this is 52 billion meticais
(about $1.9 million).

The central government has already
sent eight billion meticais to the province for mitigation programmes, of which
six billion have so far been spent.

The United Nations World Food Programme
is stepping up its activities in the province, and has raised the number of
beneficiaries whom it supplies from 26,500 to 62,000 as from this month. As
from January the number of people in Gaza benefiting from WFP aid is expected
to rise to about 90,000.

Malnourished children dying
in Sofala

The effects of the drought are leading
to increased deaths in Sofala province. On 15 November the Maputo daily "Noticias"
reported that at least 289 children, out of 1,408 diagnosed cases, died from
malnutrition in Sofala province during the first nine months of this year.

These figures were disclosed during
a meeting of the Provincial Health Consultative Council in Beira. Last year
182 malnourished children died.

The health authorities blame worsening
malnutrition on the drought that has gripped much of southern and central Mozambique.

Minister of Women's Affairs and Social
Welfare, Virgilia Matabele, on 9 November warned that, on current trends, the
number of children in the country who have lost one or both their parents to
AIDS will rise to 600,000 by 2010. She was speaking at an expanded session of
the National Council for the Fight against AIDS (CNCS), which was analysing
the state of the epidemic in central Mozambique.

The latest statistics on HIV prevalence
among Mozambicans aged between 15 and 49 years gives a national average of 16.2
per cent. But in central Mozambique 20.4 per cent of people in that age bracket
are HIV-positive, while in Sofala province the figure rises to over 26 per cent.

Matabele pointed to the "feminisation"
of the epidemic. Around 60 per cent of the Mozambicans living with HIV/AIDS
are women, and 40 per cent of the infected women are living in the central region.
It is thought that 130,000 Mozambican teenagers (aged between 15 and 19) are
HIV-positive, and 75 per cent of these youngsters are girls.

Dealing with this situation required
a wide range of activities, said Matabele, to halt the spread of infection,
particularly among young people, to prevent "vertical transmission"
(from HIV-positive mothers to their babies), to provide anti-retroviral treatment
to infected women and children, and to protect orphaned and vulnerable children.

The latest demographic and health
survey of the National Statistics Institute (INE), carried out in 2003, showed
a worrying gap in knowledge, with many more men than women knowing how to protect
themselves. Matabele said that whereas 59 per cent of men knew at least two
ways of preventing HIV/AIDS, the figure dropped to 44 per cent among women.

As for vertical transmission, Matabele
said about 35,000 babies are born annually carrying the HIV virus, and that
currently about 140,000 pregnant women are HIV-positive. She added that over
5,000 pregnant women have received anti- retroviral treatment, and over 3,000
new born infants have been treated with the anti-retroviral drug nevirapine,
known to reduce dramatically the chances of vertical transmission.

Matabele praised the work of the
Education Ministry in putting messages on the prevention of HIV/AIDS into the
primary school curriculum, and the attempts of the Ministry of Youth and Sports,
aided by UN agencies, to carry the message to young people outside of school.

Nonetheless, given the frightening
demographic impact of AIDS, it was necessary to find more effective mechanisms
for halting the spread of the disease.

"When children are orphaned,
after their parents have died of AIDS, they become the responsibility of foster
families, which are overburdened", said Matabele. Such children and such
families needed to be assisted through professional training and income generation
schemes.

There were also serious problems
concerning the inheritance due to children whose parents die of AIDS, and the
fate of women whose husbands fall victim to the disease. Matabele warned that
when men die of AIDS there is a serious danger of violence against their widows,
who are forced to abandon the family home, making the survival of their children
all the more difficult.

Health Minister Ivo Garrido on 11
November stressed the importance of gender equality, saying that this must be
regarded, not as merely a women's issue, but as a question of human rights.
"All of us, men and women, may suffer gender inequalities in the social
sphere, but the fact that women suffer the burden of discrimination much more
heavily impels us men to look at that discrimination perceptively", he
said, at the opening of a National Seminar on Gender and Health.

Unless the question was viewed as
a matter of human rights, Garrido warned, women would continue to have no chance
to decide on their own lives, including their state of health.

Gender equality, he continued, meant
justice in the distribution of benefits, power, resources and responsibilities
between men and women.

The integration of gender issues
into the health sector, Garrido stressed, was part of the government's undertaking
to reduce poverty. In fact, the national health service is doing quite well
in terms of recruiting women, but the top echelons of the sector are still dominated
by men. Garrido noted that the medical faculty at the country's largest university,
the Eduardo Mondlane University, is training more women than men - nonetheless,
women are still not very visible in health leadership and management.

But the Minister recognised there
has been progress in promoting women at provincial level; now that progress
needed to be replicated in the districts.

As for women's access to health services,
Garrido said this had slowly improved - even so, only 47 per cent of births
in the country happen in health units.

Garrido expressed his opposition
to the payment of any fees for health services by poor women. This was a barrier
to access that ought to be eliminated.

Prime Minister Luisa Diogo on 9 November
swore into office the new chairman of the board of the country's publicly owned
electricity company, EDM, Manuel Cuambe.

Cuambe, formerly the EDM director
of electrification and projects, was appointed at a cabinet meeting on 8 November
- the same meeting which relieved his predecessor, Vicente Veloso, of the job.

Prime Minister Diogo urged Cuambe
to work so as to ensure good relations between EDM and its clients. The Prime
Minister stressed that the major challenge facing EDM is the continued electrification
of the Mozambican countryside, including by generators in those areas where
the national grid, drawing power mainly from the Cahora Bassa dam, has not yet
reached.

Prime Minister Diogo described EDM
as "a strategic company", because "where there is electricity,
development can begin".

She downplayed the allegations of
corruption and mismanagement that have been levelled in the press against Veloso.
"We have to change our way of looking at things", she said. "We
have to change the culture of people who think that when the chairman of a public
company leaves the job, it's because he has problems". The fact was, she
added, that the chairman has a term of office (normally five years), at the
end of which it may be renewed or not.

Nonetheless, Prime Minister Diogo
admitted, "there may be cases when a particular company chairman is dismissed
because he has not been doing his job properly. But in such cases the government
would not wait until the end of his term of office".

"With Veloso, this is not the
case", she stressed. (Veloso served two full terms, and his second term
expired many months ago.)

After the ceremony, Veloso recognised
that there were tasks he had left undone, which he blamed on financial difficulties.
But he stressed that he "had the mission of ensuring that electricity from
the national grid reached all the provinces, and that was accomplished, thanks
to the young and fabulous team the company possesses".

The publicly owned Mozambican ports
and railway company, CFM, is to rehabilitate 45 diesel powered locomotives as
from January 2006 as part of its efforts to restructure the company and render
it more profitable,.

This work, that also includes the
rehabilitation of 1,000 wagons, is to be done in South Africa, and is budgeted
at $31 million.

CFM delegate to the northern region,
Filipe Nhusse, told reporters that to render CFM more competitive in the region,
a new company has been created, named "Xitimela Leasing Ltd" where
CFM holds 67.5 per cent of the shares, the remaining 32.5 belonging to South
African investors. This company will lease out some of the rehabilitated locomotives.

Nhusse explained that the work is
to start in January 2006, and it is expected to be completed by the end of the
year, but the first few repaired locomotives should be returned to Mozambique
by March or April.

"Now we are in the process of
mobilising the necessary resources to bring to Maputo, by the end of this month,
those engines that are in the northern port of Nacala, and have them ready to
be transported to South Africa", he said.

He further explained that after their
rehabilitation, some of the engines will be used by CFM, to improve its capacity
in terms of transport, both of cargo and of passengers, while others will be
put out to hire by "Xitimela Leasing", inside or outside the country.

As for the costs, Nhusse explained
that, for instance, to bring the 10 locomotives from Nacala to Maputo, CFM is
being charged about $500,000 because it takes a special ship, with a high cargo
capacity.

Despite the two instalments of the
HIPC (Heavily Indebted Poor Counties) debt relief initiative, Mozambique's foreign
debt still stood at over $4.4 billion at the end of 2004.

Addressing a Maputo workshop on debt
management on 14 November, organised by the NGO coalition known as the Mozambican
Debt Group (GMD), economist Adelino Pimpao pointed out that, since Mozambique
continued to contract loans, the debt continued to rise. But its structure was
different: prior to HIPC, most of the debt was bilateral, but now new loans
come overwhelmingly on soft terms from multilateral organisations such as the
World Bank. As a result, as of late 2004, 52 per cent of the debt was to the
multilateral bodies.

Prior to HIPC, Mozambique had an
unsustainable debt of $6.1 billion. Between them, original HIPC and "enhanced"
HIPC wrote off $4.3 billion of debt in nominal terms (or just over $2 billion
in net present value terms). But even during the years of HIPC negotiations,
there were more loans. So after "enhanced" HIPC, the debt only fell
(in nominal terms) to $3.6 billion - a substantial sum, but the lowest debt
for about two decades.

More important is the debt service
ratio - annual debt servicing as a percentage of exports of goods and services.
This, Pimpao said, had fallen from 27 per cent in 1995 to just eight per cent
in 2003. In terms of cash, Mozambique is paying its creditors about $100 million
a year less than it would, in theory, have been paying without HIPC.

Yet the debt remains a drag on the
state budget, and the country still spends more a year on debt servicing than,
for example, on the health budget.

That was the context for the initiative
by the G8 group of most developed countries this year, under which what is billed
as "100 per cent" of the debts owed by Mozambique and 17 other poor
countries to the World Bank, the IMF and the African Development Bank will be
scrapped.

But at the workshop nobody could
say much about this. For the relief has been promised, but the details have
not yet been ironed out. Indeed, the national director of policy studies in
the Ministry of Planning and Development, Jose Sulemane, warned that the G8
announcement might not make any difference to the 2006 budget.

The budget that the government is
presenting to the country's parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, envisages
much the same level of debt servicing (around $55 million) in 2006 as in 2005.
This seems to be a prudent attitude of only including in the budget debt relief
that is fully confirmed.

Nonetheless, one donor source told
AIM it was likely that the G8 initiative would knock $30 million a year off
Mozambique's debt service.

While the public foreign debt has
fallen, and with the G8 initiative looks certain to fall much further, some
other categories of debt are rising. Domestic debt was scarcely a blip on the
balance sheet in the 1990s - but reached about 1,000 billion meticais (some
$35 million at current exchange rates) in 2003, falling off somewhat in the
following year.

The huge rise in domestic indebtedness
came in 2001, and the reason was clearly the recapitalisation of the two privatised
banks, the BCM and Austral, which had been driven to the brink of ruin by their
new owners. The state, which had remained a minority shareholder in both banks,
was forced to rescue them and raised the money to do so through issuing treasury
bonds at high interest rates. Paying off this debt will remain a burden on the
state budget for years to come.

Pimpao pointed out that private company
debt has also become significant. The payment of interest on these private debts
was less than $20 million in 1998, but reached over $120 million in 2004.

The Mozambican parliament, the Assembly
of the Republic, on 9 November unanimously passed the first reading of a bill
establishing the Council of State, a body that will advise the President of
the Republic.

The Council of State is envisaged
in the constitutional amendments that took effect in January, but before it
can be set up it needs a law establishing how it will function.

The Council will be chaired by the
President, and its members include the chairperson of the Assembly (Eduardo
Mulembue), the Prime Minister (Luisa Diogo), the chairperson of the Constitutional
Council (Rui Baltazar), the runner-up in the latest presidential elections (Afonso
Dhlakama, leader of Renamo) and the Ombudsman (a post which has yet to be filled).

Any former Presidents and former
heads of the Assembly will also sit on the Council of State. Currently there
are only two such individuals - Joaquim Chissano, who was President from 1986
to February this year, and Marcelino dos Santos, who headed the Assembly from
1986 to 1994.

In addition, the President will appoint
four "personalities of recognised merit", to the Council, while the
Assembly will elect seven other such personalities "in accordance with
parliamentary representation".

Given that the ruling Frelimo Party
has 160 seats in the Assembly, and Renamo has 90, this means in reality that
the Frelimo parliamentary group will appoint five members of the Council, while
Renamo appoints two.

The bill states that the President
must consult with the Council of State over the holding of general elections,
any dissolution of the Assembly, any declaration of war, or of a state of siege
or of emergency, or on holding any referendum. He may also call Council meetings
to seek advice at any other time he deems fit.

The bill states that members of the
Council of State will not be paid, though their travel and other expenses may
be reimbursed. They will be entitled to a diplomatic passport, and a special
identity card. Each member will also be entitled to carry a firearm "for
personal defence".

No member of the Council may be arrested
without the Council's consent, unless caught red-handed committing an offence
for which the penalty is a prison sentence of two years or longer.

This list of privileges was not sufficient
for Renamo. The Renamo members of the Assembly's Legal Affairs Commission demanded
that all members of the Council of State should be paid (they did not say how
much), that each council member should be given a state vehicle and free medical
care, and that spouses and children of Council members should also receive diplomatic
passports.

The Frelimo majority on the Commission
objected, pointing out that such a list of privileges made no sense for membership
of what was merely an advisory body, and one which might not meet very often.
Free medical care and state vehicles were granted to people occupying certain
permanent positions, and diplomatic passports were solely for the bearer, and
could not be extended to his or her family members. The Frelimo deputies on
the commission thus regarded the Renamo proposals as "irrelevant and without
merit".

Renamo has not yet tabled any formal
amendments to the bill, though that may happen when it is given a second reading
to approve it article by article. The unanimity that characterised the vote
on the overall bill may then break down.

The Japanese government has approved
a grant equivalent to about $424,000 for mine clearance in the central province
of Zambezia. To this end, the Japanese embassy and the Halo Trust, the Scottish-based
NGO that will carry out the demining, signed an agreement in Maputo on 4 November.

Halo Trust representative Tim Turner
told reporters that the Japanese grant will allow the demining work in Zambezia
to be concluded in 2006. "I think it will be possible to complete the work
in 2006, and extend demining activities to the northern provinces", said
Turner.

But he warned of a series of obstacles
that make demining a slow process - including contradictory information about
where mines were laid (a problem he regarded as characteristic of post- conflict
situations), the difficulties in access to remote areas, and the painstakingly
meticulous nature of demining.

But he was optimistic that by the
end of the Halo Trust's work all explosive devices will have been removed from
all 16 of Zambezia's districts.

He believed that mine clearance has
made great advances since the mid-1990s. "The number of land mine accidents
has fallen drastically", he said. "Between 1996 and 2003 there were
about 100 accidents a year, but in 2004 there were 30, and so far this year
there have been 13".

This is a condensed version of the
AIM daily news service - for details contact aim@tvcabo.co.mz